Jim Geraghty of National Review Online explains how former President Donald Trump could return to the White House.
If you’re an incumbent president running for reelection like Joe Biden, you definitely want to have a job-approval rating higher than 39.1 percent. As grim as that figure seems, that’s actually a bit higher than it has been in recent weeks.
If you’re Biden, you would prefer that people rate the state of the economy highly — they do not — and that they think the country is on the right track instead of headed in the wrong direction. Those numbers are similarly grim for an incumbent president.
If you’re Biden, you would prefer to be ahead in the head-to-head matchups in national polls, with or without the likely third-party candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, and Jill Stein.
You would prefer to consistently lead in swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. That is not the case. You can find a good poll for Biden here and there, but the majority point to Trump leads — usually narrow, but sometimes not-so-narrow. A Fox News survey released March 27 had Trump ahead in Pennsylvania, 50 percent to 45 percent.
If you’re the Biden campaign, you’d like to see some poll numbers pointing to a chance to pick off a reddish state or two like Florida, Iowa, or North Carolina. So far, those numbers aren’t there.
If you’re pulling for Biden, you might even wonder if there was a chance of winning four of Maine’s electoral votes instead of only three, and realize that’s looking like a long shot, too. In fact, Maine as a whole could well turn red this year, at least based upon one poll conducted in mid-February.
If you’re the Biden campaign, and you’re looking for recently competitive states that look pretty secure, you’re limited to Minnesota and New Hampshire. (Trump lost Minnesota by just 1.5 percent back in 2016.)
Add it all up, and you have a formula for Donald Trump winning more than 270 electoral votes in November.
